Today at the allotment I pulled up the last of my outdoor spring onions. My daughter eats spring onions like sweets, so I made sure there were some ready for when she came home from school.
I also picked a couple of small cabbages and some carrots for tea.
I spent a lot of the morning digging holes for three large posts, to support the grape vines I bought in the summer. I managed to buy them when they were reduced to just £1.50 each, so I bought three.
I knew I wouldn’t get round to putting up the supports for a while, so I just planted the grape vines where I wanted them to grow and left them to sprawl over the floor a while.
Today, I finally managed to put the posts and wire up and I tied the grape vines to their new wire supports. I’m looking forward to some grapes in the future so maybe I can start to make some wine? This will be a new adventure for me.
While I was doing all of this, a frog jumped out and sat watching me for about an hour. It was really quite sweet and I couldn’t help talking to it. It probably thought I was mad!
I also did some clearing again today. I pulled up my pumpkin plants, sweet corn and some more calendula near to my shed.
At this time of the year I have mixed feelings, as I love to clear the old crops away and feel like the plot is being ‘put to bed’ for the winter , but I also feel very sad as I have to wait a good few ‘cold winter’ months before I can start to sow crops again. However, I always cheer myself up with the thought of planning next year’s crops and looking through seed catalogues.
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Today I made some biscuits for the weekend. These biscuits are my families favourite and they eat them extremely quickly. To get around this, I freeze the biscuits and just bring a few out daily. They freeze very well and take less than half an hour to defrost.
In this recipe I use cooking chocolate, which I chop up into small pieces. I find this a lot cheaper than buying chocolate chips and doesn’t take too long to do and it tastes just as nice.
For those readers who are dairy intolerant, the margarine and chocolate can be substituted with dairy free alternatives and the biscuits taste just as good.
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Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe:
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Ingredients:
75 grams of Margarine
175 grams of Demerara Sugar
Few drops of Vanilla Extract
1 Egg
175 grams of self-raising flour
100 grams of cooking chocolate
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Preheat your oven Gas 4 / 180C / 350F
Put the margarine sugar, and vanilla extract into a bowl and cream together until combined.
Add the egg and beat into the mixture.
Sift the flour into the bowl and add the chocolate.
Fold the flour and chocolate into the mixture until all the flour has disappeared.
Roll the mixture into small balls with your hands and place the balls on a greased baking sheet.
(Make sure you give each ball lots of room to spread out).
Bake for approximately 15 minutes.
Leave to cool on the baking tray for one minute before transferring to a cooling tray.
Thank you for reading my blog today.
I am hoping the weather stays good so i can get my garden ready for the winter, will be turning the green tomatoes into chutney, i am so looking forward to planning the vegetable growing next year, my sister brought me “the Wartime Farm” book has the original cropping plan they used during the war, am looking forward to the reading that, Harry Dodson used the same plan to grow at Chiltern, so many inspirational gardeners old and new to read this winter.
Have a good weekend. sue
Hi Sue. I also love ‘Wartime Farm’ and I find the program inspirational. I came across this link the other day, though I’ve only managed to read the first page so far, but it sounds interesting and I thought you may like it too:
Thank you very much for the link it looks very interesting, i have watched and got all the dvds and books from all there series, the Green Valley 1620 farm is one of my favourites, i do wonder if they will do any more has been so educational.
sue
As you are putting your allotment to bed for the winter I am not exactly putting mine to bed but I am putting a blanket over it. But in my case it’s a blanket of mulch to protect the ground, and plants, from the ravages of the 35c degree days. Some folk here just cover the ground with a green manure crop over the summer – our way of putting the allotment to bed.
I loved the link to the Allotment Garden Guides from the war. I was born in 1943 and it’s nostalgic to see what folk were doing in those days. I’ll pass that link on to some of my fellow allotment holders who I am sure would be interested.
Nice read. Those cookies look so yummy.
Thanks Stacey, they do taste nice.
Rounding things up for wintertime is bitter sweet isn’t it! Autumn/Winter vege is so different to Spring/Summer ones 😦
Love the bickies. You do what I do, chop up the blocks, lol!
Wow! I would never get a grape vine for so little! Cheap for us without it being dead is, oh, say $10?
Hi Mrs Yub. I was very pleased with my grapevines, plants aren’t normally that cheap over here, I think I was in the right place at the right time to grab a bargin lol. They look decent plants though.
Yes it’s cheaper to chop the chocolate up and doesn’t take long to do. It’s the only way I can do it when I make the dairyfree cookies for my daughter as I have to use the dairyfree chocolate (though it is more expensive chocolate it still tastes lovely).
Its great that the alternatives can still get the job. My MIL buys carob (spelling?) and it tases sort of like weak sweet cocoa, but I think I could cook with it if I needed to.
I’ve never tried carob. I wonder how it would cook?
That is an interesting question! I will ask if she has ever tried.